Come to Me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from Me, I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and my burden is light.” (Matthew 11:28-30 ESV)
I’ve been grappling with a word for weeks now. It has become my annual habit to prayerfully choose a word for the year to come and this year I’ve been drawing blanks.
I suppose it’s the track record of previous years and words that has made me a bit gun-shy. Words like trust, abide, serve, give, grow and most recently restore have been strong indicators of the 365 days that followed. As I considered potential words for 2020 I also considered their dark side; what could they predict.
My very dear friend and I had a long phone call about it on the last day of 2019. She suggested that a word might be repeated, especially if I had not yet found the fullness of it. The next morning I opened my devotional to consider her thoughts and when I looked at last year’s word, RESTORE, all I could see was REST.
I wondered, could there be a harder word for me, the one with the ever-frantic pace? How can I write ‘rest’ into the margins of my life? What would that look like from day to day? Can I rest and minister and pursue a degree at the same time? How might ‘rest’ affect the posture of my heart?
Rest has never been my strong suit. I tend to go and do until I can’t go and do anymore. Ironically, even these first few days of the new year have me holed up at home with a cold and without a voice. ‘Rest’ is a must until I’m recovered.
Rest doesn’t mean without work or without effort. It’s not an excuse for laziness. Rest means we take regular pauses. We give good room in our lives for relying on God, observing Sabbath. We take breaks and expect Him to fill in the gaps where our flesh stops. Rest means establishing regular rhythms of reflection and repose. It means not running a hundred miles an hour until the wheels fall off, but trusting God enough to take some time off while there is still gas in the tank and tread on the tires.
I don’t know about you, but I tend to insist on doing things the hard way. Somewhere along the line I’ve bought the lie that discipline is greater than grace but the truth is we need both. Rest is us relying on God’s ability to keep things in check while we take a break.
So what does ‘rest’ look like?
For me, I felt the Spirit give specific instructions.
Moments of rest each day.
A day of rest each week.
An away of rest each quarter.
By the end of New Year’s Day I’d realized that for me, choosing any other word this year would only result in even more striving. I don’t think that’s what God wants from my heart in 2020. I think He longs for me to trust in Him in whole new ways.
“Come with Me by yourselves to a quiet place and get some rest.” (Mark 6:31 NIV)
Lord, let us see what ‘rest’ looks like in the year to come. We aren’t looking for an excuse to be lazy, but a way to work in moments of reflection and recharging. We want to give You room for glory in the pages of our story. May we decide now to let up the pace and settle in with You a bit more deeply; daily, weekly, quarterly. Amen.